She began her doctoral studies in linguistics at University of California-Santa Cruz and Berkeley, but abandoned them in 1976. in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. Tan ended up marrying the young man in 1974 and subsequently earned both her B.A. After she dropped out to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she and her mother stopped speaking for six months. Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, a Baptist college of her mother's choosing. In 1987, she and her mother traveled to China to meet her three half-sisters for the first time. Her mother had left her husband and children behind in Shanghai - an incident that became the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. It was during this period that Tan learned about her mother's previous marriage in China, where she had four children (a son who died in toddlerhood and three daughters). Tan subsequently moved with her mother and younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where she finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa in Montreux. When she was fifteen, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other. Although she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved a number of times throughout her childhood. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the US to escape the Chinese Revolution. Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) brought her fame and has remained one of her most popular works. Education-B.A., M.A., San Jose State UniversityĪmy Tan is a Chinese-American writer, many of whose works explore mother-daughter relationships.Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, a young woman finds herself in China, looking for a way to reconcile the ghosts of her past with the dreams of her future.

Amy Tan's latest effort unfolds a series of family secrets that questions the connection between fate, beliefs, and hopes, memory and imagination, and the natural gifts of our hundred secret senses.

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan